Richard Ben Cramer

Richard Ben Cramer (June 12, 1950 – January 7, 2013) was an American journalist and writer.

Cramer was born and raised in Rochester, New York, the son of Brud and Blossom Cramer. He graduated from Brighton High School in 1967. He wrote for Trapezoid, the school's student newspaper, after he was cut from the baseball team. He earned a bachelor's degree in the Liberal Arts in 1971 from Johns Hopkins University where he was also a writer and editor for The Johns Hopkins News-Letter. Unable to land a job at The Baltimore Sun, he instead attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he received a master's degree one year later in 1972.

Cramer worked as a journalist at several well-known publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, Esquire Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1979 for his coverage of the Middle East. His work as a political reporter culminated in What It Takes: The Way to the White House, an account of the 1988 presidential election that is considered one of the seminal journalistic studies of presidential electoral politics. His book, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life was a New York Times bestseller in 2000. He was an avid New York Yankees fan and lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His final published book was How Israel Lost: The Four Questions, about the ways in which the Israeli occupation has corrupted the country's original vision.